Richard Price : Lucky Day (Carcanet, Manchester, 2005. £8.95. 128 pages).

Lucky Day, a first collection, offers access to an intensely private world of carefully sustained emotion, reflection and observation. The precision of its pared down language makes starker the underlying themes of vulnerability and resilience. Through shifts of ever-present change obtrude glimpses of longed-for hopes and happinesses that polish an uncompromising reality.

Hazard lights, idling,
wipers' tongues

dry off. 'I
I wish you well.'

Actually holding hands.
'Friends?'

'You'll miss your.'
'I'll miss my.'

'I wish…
I wish.'

(I Wish)

One of the collection's most sharply perceived sections is 'Hand Held' a series of poems chronicling the demands and delights of raising a daughter with Angelman syndrome. The sleeplessness, hyperactivity and social concern are weighed against a family relationship buoyed by affection and creative humanity and presented in a direct, sometimes childlike language, which opens us to an understanding of the immense commitment and ultimate pleasure Price experiences. The potency of this simple, simplified verse is witnessed in its capacity to express the futility of symbolic communication with a person with whom communication can never be verified, and the joy when human contact can.

Katie reaches out
all sticky fingers,
no tissues
(just cash, a poem)
and seeks my look
and laughs on receipt,
laugh beyond thinking,
and cannot say
and cannot say,

(Receipt)

In the following section, 'A News', Price broadens his perspective to encompass the impact on him of the world of current affairs served up by the media – truanting pupils, stowaways, computer technology and '… the hostages at Camp X-Ray':

A kind
of authority.

Infantry
taken as generals,
blindfolded.

Pleas, and no
civil answers

(An Authority)

His use of ellipses to signify thought beyond or not put into words has echoes of the work of Peter Dent, and his mischievousness with language, punctuation and exploratory lay out has the tongue-in-cheek freshness of e e cummings – some of the poems about love and sex have that same profound simplicity and handmade vocabulary.

A bra's parachute –
it was never going to open.

Listen, freefall
enfolds us.

We're lust and kindness.
Off comes

the undeveloped harness –
standard issue – released.

Above/
Beneath,

(Cadets)

Price's work is innovative but always available. As a founder of Informationist poetry his declared aim 'to rewire the new of the everyday to itself' acutely positions his poetry within a series of technological moments. Too good a poet to allow dictum to stifle expression, he succeeds in applying the aesthetic to gain a human perspective on the impersonal, sometimes alienating devices that pervade the everyday of contemporary life, whether it's the electricity pylon he makes love beneath or the computer screen on which he's contemplating Vermeer's 'Woman with a balance' and being reminded of a past girlfriend. Objects become one with his lyrics' carefully worked emotional flow and their taut para-logical perspectives.